Love is Eternal

Historians are inclined to dismiss the historical novel as having no positive value and, as a matter of fact, of contributing in a major way to the misunderstanding of history. Yet a great many readers of the biographical novels of Irving Stone would know nothing at all about Jessie and John Charles Fremont, Rachel and Andrew Jackson, and—currently—Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln, were it not for his books. Despite the liberties he has taken with his subject, the knowledge his readers have gained of American history is essentially accurate. In recording the events of history, he is meticulously careful; it is only when he introduces the thoughts and words of his characters that his biographical portraits are open to question.

The reader of this book will emerge with a better pen portrait of the Lexington, Kentucky, and the Springfield, Illinois, of Mary Todd Lincoln’s time than he will find in any other work in the field of Lincolniana, with the possible exception of Carl Sandburg’s description of Springfield in The Prairie Years. These cities come alive in Mr. Stone’s pages. In the Washington-Presidential period, the reader is more apt to be disappointed. Here the portrait is less convincing.

Mr. Stone is obviously in love with his heroine. He does not try to explain away all of her faults—as some writers have imprudently done—but he does use the novelist’s device to build up his heroine at the expense of her husband. That Abraham Lincoln was a difficult husband no one can deny, but Mrs. Lincoln was far from perfect herself. Lincoln’s spells of melancholia are exaggerated, and in the hands of a skillful artist help to convey a most sympathetic portrait of Mrs. Lincoln.

If the portrait of Lincoln does not quite accord with the opinions of most of the reputable Lincoln biographers, the story itself is told with a high degree of literary craftsmanship.

Stormy Ben Butler

Nobody ever felt neutral about Ben Butler. He was a great hero to some, and an unmitigated scoundrel to others, but he was always impressive. His career extended from 1818 to 1893, and while he devoted himself chiefly to the personal advancement of Ben Butler he did play an important role, in war and in peace, during some of the most eventful years of American history. You can do everything with him but ignore him.

He was a lawyer—one of the best; a soldier—one of the worst; and a politician, in which field he was at least one of the most active. Controversy hangs over almost everything he did, and much of it still unresolved. A modern life of Butler has been greatly overdue.

There are weaknesses in this book. Parts of Butler’s career—especially his early years—are brushed over lightly, while other parts are minutely examined; the result is a feeling of imbalance. Some basic questions (was Butler really as dishonest as he often seems to have been?) are not answered at all. There are lapses in historical technique, here and there, and this unfortunately is not the definitive life of Butler.

However, the book makes very interesting reading. Professional historians might take note that one more gifted amateur has entered the field and has laid a valid claim to a share of their audience’s attention.

The White and the Gold

Once again Mr. Costain demonstrates that the ability to write interesting and swiftly-moving prose is a talent badly needed in historical writing. In this book he tells the story of the French in Canada, from the earliest days down to the end of the Seventeenth Century—the period during which French Canada produced great explorers, leaders and administrators—and he makes of it, as the saying goes, a story that is “fascinating as a novel.” And why not? Like most other segments of history, the story is fascinating: all it needs is someone who can tell it so that the fascination gets a fair chance to come through to the reader. This talent Mr. Costain has, and he couples it with a solid capacity for factual research.

The Remarkable Mr. Jerome

Leonard Jerome was a personable and talented man from upstate New York who set out to be a lawyer, served for a time as a publisher, and then went to Manhattan to enter the lists in Wall Street, which he did with such marked success that he became very wealthy and emerged as one of the city’s more prominent yachtsmen, horsemen, bon vivants and men-about-town. His claim to fame now is that his daughter, Jennie, one of the numerous American heiresses of the post-Civil War era to attract the regard of bachelor sprigs of European nobility, made a marriage which was both happy and historically important. She became the wife of Randolph Churchill, younger son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, and bore a son who was to become world-famous in our own generation as Winston Churchill. Jerome himself appears to have been a moderately interesting man, and the story is entertainingly told.

The Jacksonians

The purely administrative system of the Federal government has an importance often overlooked by historians, and in this book Dr. White goes far to remedy this oversight. He examines the results of the advent of Jacksonian democracy, when the people laid their own hands on large parts of the administrative mechanism, and concludes that the democratic character of governmental administration which resulted was in reality the great contribution of the Jacksonians. This, he says, “brought endless sources of vitality into the body administrative from the body politic,” and made it certain that “the relationship between the people and their administrative system was not again to suggest preference to the well-born and the well-to-do.”

By These Words

In this book Mr. Angle has brought together some 46 of the most stirring and eloquent documents highlighting the long struggle for liberty in America, ranging all the way from the Mayflower Compact, through the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Lincoln’s two inaugural addresses and John Peter Altgeld’s noble protest to Grover Cleveland over the use of Federal troops in the 1894 Pullman strike, to President Eisenhower’s inaugural address. Each document is introduced by a page or two of text recounting the circumstances under which it was produced; and the whole makes an uncommonly valuable collection of some of the great, moving papers that have helped to shape American history.

Adventure in Freedom

In this book, Dr. Handlin considers the three centuries of Jewish life in America as “an adventure in freedom.” Seeking to provide an interpretation rather than a complete history of the Jews in the United States, he remarks that when the Jews came to America they moved into a society unlike any that they had previously met. They came together from all parts of Europe, where they had lived—often in isolation from one another—in established, sharply-regulated communities; in America these separate groups came together, no longer forced to live apart from the broader community, under circumstances which permitted almost any degree of dispersion and which tended to break down the rigid caste lines which previously had operated both within and without the Jewish community. The Jews, in short, experienced democracy—to the enrichment both of Jewish life and of the life of the nation as a whole.

The Light of Distant Skies

Mr. Flexner, who has the gift of making art and artists spring to life in his writing, has now produced the second in a projected many-volume history of American painting. First Flowers of Our Wilderness (1947) dealt with the beginnings, while the new book covers the Revolutionary period and its aftermath, the years to 1835, when the headquarters of American art shifted to England, following Copley, Stuart and Trumbull to what seemed more hospitable and appreciative shores. West, Peale, Morse, Vanderlyn, Allston and others are subjects of well developed studies in what is certainly an important book. The only flaw is that none of the hundred plates in the book is in color—which one might reasonably expect in a work on painting. There was a day, only a few years ago, when four-color engravings might be made for less than a prince’s ransom.

Furniture Treasury

This seven and one-half pound volume includes all of the 5,000 illustrations of the original Furniture Treasury, first published in 1928 and reissued in 1948. It is the authoritative picture book on American antiques for both the amateur and the professional.

A Check List of New Books

Indians of the Plains, by Robert H. Lowie. McGraw-Hill Book Company. $4.75. A handbook on the culture of the first inhabitants of the Western Great Plains, richly illustrated by 105 pictures and diagrams.

George Washington: Patriot and President, Vol. VI, by Douglas Southall Freeman. Charles Scribner’s Sons. $7.50. The last of Dr. Freeman’s opus, completed before his death. It deals with Washington up to the age of 61, his travels in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the South, and his becoming the country’s first President.

Houses Virginians Have Loved, by Agnes Rothery. Rinehart & Company. $7.95. A book of houses, dating back to Colonial times, that represent our American heritage. Illustrated with 100 photographs.

Shadows in Silver, by A. Lawrence Kocher and Howard Dearstyne. Charles Scribner’s Sons. $7.50. This book presents a record of Virginia from 1850 to 1900 in contemporary photographs taken by George and Huestis Cook, plus pictures from the Cook Collection.

Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People, by Verner W. Crane. Little, Brown & Company. $3. A short biography of the public career of this many-sided American.

The Coming of the Revolution, 1763–1775, by Lawrence Henry Gipson. Harper & Brothers. $5. An authority on the Eighteenth Century British empire examines the causes of the American war of independence. A volume in the New American Nation series.

Spies for the Blue and Gray, by Harnett T. Kane. Hanover House. $3.50. A round-up of the men and women who served as spies, North and South, in the Civil War.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, by Wallace Stegner. Houghton Mifflin Company. $6. The story of John Wesley Powell who, having conquered the waters of the Grand Canyon, directed the development of the American West.

Alexandra Gripenberg’s A Half Year In The New World, translated and edited by Ernest J. Moyne. University of Delaware Press. A titled foreigner’s view of America in the late 1880’s.

The English People on the Eve of Colonization, 1603–1630, by Wallace Notestein. Harper & Brothers. $5. This addition to the New American Nation series studies the character of the English people at a time when many Englishmen were making a fresh start in the New World.

Florida Fiasco, by Rembert W. Patrick. University of Georgia Press. $5. Turbulence along the Georgia-Florida border, before and during the War of 1812.

The Life of Abraham Lincoln, by Stefan Lorant. McGraw-Hill Book Company. 256 pp. $3.50. A short illustrated biography of Lincoln, comprehensive and well-written. Mr. Lorant is a master of the art of marrying pictures and text to bring his subjects to life.

Profile of America, edited by Emily Davie. Thomas Y. Crowell Company. 415 pp. $8.50. A fine compilation of original writings from American history. Beginning with a report of Leif Ericsson’s voyage, taken from an old Norse saga, it traces the American story in the letters, speeches and diaries of those who witnessed it. Bryan Holme has made an excellent choice of accompanying photographs and the publisher has had the wisdom to reproduce them by sheet-fed gravure printing instead of by the dead-gray offset process which is often thought good enough for picture books.

The Jews in America: A History, by Rufus Learsi. World Publishing Co. $6. A factual history of American Jewry documenting the important events and important people during the three hundred years of their life in North America.

A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee. Oxford University Press. Vols. VII–X. $35. The four latest volumes of Dr. Toynbee’s series covering: Universal States, Universal Churches, Heroic Ages, Contacts Between Civilizations in Space—In Time, Law and Freedom in History, The Prospects of the Western Civilization, and The Inspiration of Historians.

Realities of American Foreign Policy, by George F. Kennan. Princeton University Press. $2.75. Based on four lectures delivered at Princeton University, this book gives a cogent analysis of America’s position in the world today by a veteran diplomat.

The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, by Pat F. Garrett. University of Oklahoma Press. $2. A new edition of Sheriff Garrett’s “authentic” story of the Kid, first published in 1882, with a definitive introduction by J. C. Dykes.

Atoms in the Family, by Laura Fermi. University of Chicago Press. $4. A look at the atom bomb from a new angle—the feminine—by the wife of a pioneer atomic scientist.

Annie Oakley of the Wild West, by Walter Havighurst. The Macmillan Company. $4.50. A warm and careful study of a girl whom Will Rogers called “a greater character than … a rifle shot.”

The Wilderness World Of John Muir, with an introduction and interpretative comments by Edwin Way Teale. Houghton Mifflin Company. $4.50. A well-arranged anthology of the writings of a true naturalist, illustrated by Henry B. Kane.

Commerce of the Prairies, by Josiah Gregg. Edited by Max L. Moorhead. University of Oklahoma Press. $7.50. First published no years ago, this classic of the Santa Fe Trail and life on the prairies remains fresh and vivid, and has been ably edited by Mr. Moorhead.

The Last War Trail: The Utes and the Settlement of Colorado, by Robert Emmitt. University of Oklahoma Press. $4.50. A scholarly account of how the Utes were broken and western Colorado turned over to the white men.

Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History, by Katherine Anthony. Doubleday & Company. $6. A new biography of the leader of the woman’s right movement in America during the Nineteenth Century.

Bent’s Fort, by David Lavender. Doubleday & Company. $3.95. A report on the life of the traders and trappers of the Southwest in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.

The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill, by Hermann Hagedorn. The Macmillan Company. $5. The story of Teddy Roosevelt, his wife and six children, and their life in the house they loved so well at Oyster Bay, L.I.

Yankees and God, by Chard Powers Smith. Hermitage House. $6.50. A cultural and religious history of present-day Yankees and their forebears.

The Eagle, the Jaguar and the Serpent, by Miguel Covarrubias. Alfred A. Knopf. $15. A monumental survey of the Indian art of North America, with 12 pages of full color and 200 photographs and drawings.

America’s Music, by Gilbert Chase. McGraw-Hill Book Company. $7.50. A history of American music from the psalms of the Puritans to proponents of the twelve-tone system.

Rebel Rose, by Ishbel Ross. Harper & Brothers. $4. The biography of Rose O’Neal Greenhow, glamorous and dangerous woman spy in the service of the American Confederacy.

The Private World of William Faulkner, by Robert Coughlan. Harper & Brothers. $2.75. An expansion of a series of articles which appeared in Life a year ago on the Nobel Prize winning American author.

Emily Dickinson—a Revelation, by Millicent Todd Bingham. Harper & Brothers. $3. An interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s great love in her later years by the daughter of Miss Dickinson’s first editor, Mabel Loomis Todd.

The Buffalo Hunters, by Mari Sandoz. Hastings House Publishers. $4.50. An account of hunting the American bison on the Great Plains until the 1880’s.